Technical Field
The present inventions relate generally to the field of nanotechnology and, in particular, to compositions utilizing micro and/or nanoparticles for delivery active agents, such as therapeutic and imaging agents, and methods of making and methods of using such compositions.
Description of Related Art
The past quarter century's progress in the fundamental understanding of health and disease has not translated into comparable advances in clinical medicine. Inadequacies in the ability to administer therapeutic moieties so that they will selectively reach desired targets with marginal or no collateral damage has largely accounted for the discrepancy, see, e.g., Langer, R. Nature 392, 5-10 (1998); and Duncan, R. Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 2, 347-360 (2003).
Ideally, an active agent, such as a therapeutic or imaging agent, should travel through vasculature, reach the intended target at full concentration, then act selectively on diseased cells and tissues only, without creating undesired side effects. Unfortunately, even the best current therapies fail to attain this ideal behavior by a wide margin.
Nano-scale and micro-scale drug delivery systems, also known as ‘nanovectors’, are promising candidates for providing solutions to the problem of optimizing therapeutic index for a treatment, i.e. maximizing efficacy, while reducing health-adverse side effects. Even modest amounts of progress towards this goal have historically engendered substantial benefits across multiple fields of medicine, with the translatability from, for example, a subfield of oncology to a field as distant as the treatment of infectious disease being granted by the fact that the progresses had a single common denominator in the underlying technological platform. For example, liposomes, the first nanovector therapy to reach health-care fruition over 10 years ago for treatment of Kaposi's sarcoma, have also yielded advances in the treatment of breast and ovarian cancers, as well as fungal infections.
Today, many hundreds, if not thousands, of different nanovector technology platforms have joined liposomes, each with different properties, strengths, and weaknesses. Various nanovector platforms include polymer-based platforms, dendrimers, gold nano-shells, semiconductor nano-crystals, fullerenes, biologically derived nano-constructs, silicon- and silica-based nanosystems and superparamagnetic nanoparticulates are described in the literature.sup.49-75.